A World With no Digital Marketing: What Would it Be Like?
Recently we have published here in Reputation Defender’s Medium blog a series of articles dedicated to talking about the many uses we can give to digital marketing, from Social Media Marketing to Online Marketing tools. But so far, there is a topic we haven’t talked about and may be relevant if you are one of those who often spends time thinking about the multiple “what if” questions that might come up in life: What if Digital Marketing didn’t exist or suddenly stopped existing?
To answer this question, first we need to define what Digital Marketing is:
Digital marketing is the promotion of goods and services via personal computer, smartphones, and other smart devices.
It often does not need huge financial investments and resources to work, expand and allow different type of business to promote their brands by using data based campaigns and advertising. As a bonus, with digital marketing, companies can analyze the results of their marketing strategies instantly.
Since 1990, the Internet has become a powerful resource –if not need- for people to find what they want and need. Most of us use search engines to find products and services. This change in habits has opened a window for marketers to reach customers through new channels. It has also influenced the way we understand businesses and react to them as consumers.
By this definition, if we were to think about a world where only traditional marketing existed, we wouldn’t be able to track and calculate the number of people who has actually seen our post on a magazine. We couldn’t count how many people did, in fact, listen to our radio ad, or watched out TV commercial. If Digital marketing disappeared today, we would stop being able to track important metrics like who viewed our marketing campaigns, how often they were viewed and for how long. Deep data analysis would take days — if not months- to be done.
So, if Digital Marketing stopped existing, would it be that bad?
The answer is yes, it would. Digital Marketing is one of the most important tools you can use if you want to succeed in today’s brutal business environment. These days, people around the world barely open a magazine or stand a TV commercial for more than 2 seconds. Most of us just turn to our personal computers, smartphones, and tablets for everything from news and entertainment to shopping and spending time with friends and family.
Digital Marketing allows companies to access potential consumers’ information, since individuals are constantly telling their stories and daily activities online, giving marketers enough information to create personalized communications that fit individual needs and desires. This interaction creates a more intimate relationship between regular people and companies since they can communicate whenever wherever or however they want with their consumers.
- It would be difficult for organizations to study and understand what a customer really wants. Unique and personal relationships between consumers and companies would be harder to build and sustain.
- Communication would work in only one way since customers would be able to reach the big companies’ ears with their complaints or compliments. It would be for sure more difficult to access a feedback from consumers since social media platforms wouldn’t exist. Interaction to create unique experiences that could lead customers to consume a specific brand wouldn’t be possible without digital marketing.
- Launching a campaign over traditional media can be rather expensive. If digital marketing didn’t exist, it would be quite difficult for small companies with limited budgets to have a big impact on their target audience. Digital marketing allows every company –big and small- to be creative and innovative since the cost of producing a campaign is considerably low compared to traditional media.
- Forth, Digital marketing has made consumers more powerful, they are now more aware of the existence of many products and services which they would otherwise not have been aware of. This means that consumers are now are the ones in charge of deciding whether or not they want to buy something. Without digital marketing, companies were the ones telling consumers what to do and when to do it.
The change in the way we interact with our surroundings has affected the way we see companies, products and services as consumers. Digital Marketing has made it possible for everyone to decide over the things we want to consume. It has also created jobs that we probably didn’t know couldn’t exist a few decades ago. It allows people to travel and work from almost any place in the world, engaging with customers at any time and in a vast range of ways. Probably, if digital marketing didn’t exist, the world would keep spinning, but it would spin for sure in a slower and less evolved way.
